Dead Man's Walk

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These are the wild days when Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call - heroes of Lonesome Dove - first encounter the untamed frontier that will form their characters. Not yet twenty, Gus and Call enlist as Texas Rangers under the command of Caleb Cobb, a capricious outlaw determined to seize Santa Fe from the Mexicans. The two young men experience their first ...
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These are the wild days when Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call - heroes of Lonesome Dove - first encounter the untamed frontier that will form their characters. Not yet twenty, Gus and Call enlist as Texas Rangers under the command of Caleb Cobb, a capricious outlaw determined to seize Santa Fe from the Mexicans. The two young men experience their first great adventure in the barren, empty landscape of the great plains, in which arbitrary violence is the only law - whether from nature, or from those whose territory they must cross in order to reach New Mexico. Danger, sacrifice and fear test Gus and Call to the limits of endurance, as they seek the strength and courage to survive against almost insurmountable odds in the West of early nineteenth-century America.
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Dead Man's Walk
by Larry McMurtry

Excellent Read

As with all of Larry McMurtry's novels you become hooked on the characters. After reading Lonesome Dove I couldn't get enough. Dead Man's Walk adds to the saga and you can't wait to get to the next adventure. This beginning story on how they became rangers and what happened in their lives and friendship to make them the men we meet in Lonesome Dove is a must for all fans. Mr. McMurtry's characters from those you love to those you hate are written in a manner that you feel part of the experience. You know these people. I'm alway's sad when his stories are over. I want them to go on week after week.

Publishers Weekly, 1995-07-31Woodrow Call and Gus McCrae, the heroes of Lonesome Dove, return in a rousing if slightly contrived yarn set decades before the events of that Pulitzer Prize-winning novelŠand earlier still than the latter-day adventures of Call, detailed in Streets of Laredo. Now hardly more than teenage runaways, the pair, just recruited into the ragtag Rangers of the new Texas Republic, come face-to-face with death on their baptismal patrol as Gus, foolishly wandering away from his guard post, stumbles onto the grotesquely disfigured Comanche chief Buffalo Hump and narrowly escapes with the Indian's lance embedded in his hip. Gus and Call return safely to San Antonio but, lured by myths of silver and gold, the hapless duo sign on to a small army led by a former seafaring pirate intent on liberating Santa Fe from Mexican rule. An unforgettable (and equally unlikely) crew of blackhearted villains, foppish officers and star-crossed heroes and heroines, the sorry little force heads west only to be terrorized by Buffalo Hump, then captured by Mexican militia. With the ruthless Captain Salazar calling the shots, Mexicans and Americans are ordered to march toward El Paso. Along the way, Call is whipped nearly to death for a minor offense, and the group is stalked by a murderous Apache. Forced by Salazar to cross the high desert known as ``dead man's walk,'' Gus, Call and company end up at a leper colony near El Paso, where they find salvation. Suffering from McMurtry's usual coincidences and miraculous escapes, as well as from some stereotypical key characters and too much obvious melodrama, this falls short of both Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo. Still, it's bracing entertainment in its own right, with McMurtry flashing his storytelling skills as he recreates the salad days of two flawed but all-American heroes adrift in the Old West. 500,000 first printing. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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